


Found

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Furiosa cleans Max of blood and dirt, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn, to a certain degree anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-26
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-04-01 07:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 13,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4010287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a prompt on tumblr asking for Furiosa taking care of Max.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Furiosa finds him in the wasteland. One of her scouts tells her that a crazy man with a shotgun is near their border, covered in blood and twitching at shadows, and Furiosa thinks _finally_ , and she heads out across the sand. 

He is worse than he was before. Worse than the man who pointed a shaking gun at her and spoke like he was remembering how to. This man has blood on his face, and a set of handcuffs dangling from one wrist, and he limps, and he mumbles. When she pulls up to him on a bike, he raises his gun, like he did before, but his eyes are shut.

“Max?” she says, using the name she could not remember him telling her. 

He flinches like she’s hit him, and he drops his gun, and opens his eyes, and for one brief moment, he looks so relieved she can’t breathe. And then his eyes drift shut again, and he teeters, and falls. Furiosa does not move, _cannot_ move, she sits on her bike and stares at him. She can’t leave him there, inhaling sand, but she also can’t haul him onto the bike and keep him from falling if he’s unconscious. She gets off her bike. She nudges him with a foot and he makes a keening noise against the sand, like he’s pleading for something, and Furiosa swallows a shudder. This is a man who has been chewed up and spat out.

Furiosa unscrews the lid of the canteen she has hanging over her shoulder. She kneels beside Max, pushes him onto his back, then dumps the water over his face. He comes awake violent, his eyes blown wide and scared and angry, but she is ready for this, she saw the way he held his fists when he woke from some nightmare on the War Rig, and she is on her feet and away from him before he opens his eyes. It takes him a few seconds to realise who she is, and then he sinks back onto the sand, his limbs twitching, his eyelashes fluttering closed.

“Nope,” she sighs, and leans down to haul him into a sitting position, and he lets her, and then, improbably, he gets to his feet without her help. “Can you ride?” 

He grunts in reply, and she slings her canteen back across her shoulder, and climbs onto the bike. He gets on behind her, and his hands twitch at her waist until she starts it up and the roar of the bike drowns out everything else. He does not say anything to her when they get to the Citadel. He sways in place, and he lets her duck her shoulders under his arm, and he leans heavily on her while they rise into the air on the lift. 

Furiosa takes him to her room, ignoring the curious looks she gets, supporting a half-dead man through the corridors. Her room is the vault where Joe would keep his living treasures, and Angharad’s words are still on the walls. Max stares at them with unfocused eyes, and shakes his head, and turns to press his face to Furiosa’s neck, and she is so surprised she almost drops him. 

She helps him to the pool in the center of the room. He falls to his knees, clothes on, into cool water, splashing into his mouth, and Furiosa kicks her shoes off, and sits beside him. Dirt and blood come off him in waves. A thousand questions sit at her lips and she voices none of them. He will tell her anything she needs to know, and maybe more, but she will not force his torture from him. When he’s finished drinking, she takes the strip of cloth she has wrapped around her head, and she wets it, and she turns his face toward her, her fingertips light at his jaw. She washes the blood from his face, and the sand, and the dirt, and he keeps his eyes closed, and he worries his lip with his teeth, and he shakes under her hands. 

“Dag has had her baby,” she tells him, wiping the cloth across his forehead. “A girl called Angharad, of course.” 

He doesn't say anything, he leans into her touch.

“There was a siege, after you left, but we won. Gastown and the Bullet Farm need water more than we need guzzoline and bullets. They want to sort out a treaty, I’ve left it to the girls, they’re better at diplomacy.” 

She wrings the cloth out over his neck, dripping water down his back, and he shudders, and gasps; a smothered, desperate sound. She puts her hand to his skin then, dropping the cloth into the water and kneeling in front of him. She presses her fingertips to his cheekbones, collarbones, the back of his neck, checking for splintered bones and cuts brought out by the water. 

“If you take your clothes off I can check for more,” she tells him, resting her hand on his knees, failing to catch his eye.

“‘m not hurt,” he says, his voice scratched so raw she can hardly hear him. 

“That’s not true,” she says softly, but she sits back down next to him. “You’re missing a couple of fingernails, and there’s something wrong with your leg, and you have burns around your neck. That’s just what I can see.”

“Rope,” he grunts. “Leg got shot a long time ago.” She remembers he had a brace on one of his legs. He doesn't anymore. He doesn't say anything about the fingernails.

“Well you can’t stay in wet clothes all day,” she says, getting to her feet. “I've dry ones in here. We store them in case we get any wanderers who haven't got much but rags. Some should fit, and you’ll make do if they don’t.” 

She goes to the bedroom in the back and wriggles herself out of her wet pants and into some dry ones. She takes an armful of clothing back with her. He is out of the water and has taken his shoes and socks off and he is staring at the puddle that is forming around him. His jacket, mostly dry, is on the floor. He starts to shrug out of his shirt when she reaches him, tugging it at the neck until it stretches and warps, pulling it off over the handcuff still attached to his wrist. She’ll have to get the bolt cutters off Toast. His back is etched in bizarre poetry. _Genitals intact piss OK multiple scars heals fast o-negative high octane_. She has seen those words before, on other backs strung up for their blood. She passes him a new shirt, thick and soft and worn through at the elbows, and he pulls it on and the words are gone. She goes back to her bedroom when he starts to fumble with his pants, and she sits on her bed, and she thinks that something earth shattering must have happened to him. Or maybe it’s just been too long and too much and the last whole piece of him has broken too.

He comes to her then, and sits next to her on the bed. He is damp still, and the dry clothes stick to him, but he is almost clean now, and he is not trembling, and she can see his eyes. She bites back hope because she remembered what he’d said about it.

“Are you hurt anywhere else?” she asks him again, and he shakes his head and makes a noise that might be close to a no. “Come with me then, we’ll get you some food and bandage up your fingers.”

He doesn't say anything, he just turns his face to her shoulder, and presses his mouth against her neck, like he had done when they entered the room and he saw the words. _We are not things_. Furiosa doesn't say anything. She takes his hand when he moves it across the quilt, searching for hers. She braids their fingers together, and she rests her cheek against his hair, and they sit like this, in silence, until the sun turns red outside, and sinks into the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

Furiosa leaves him in her bed. He lets go of her hand, and she stretches her fingers, and he turns away from her neck, and she licks her lips. There is a patch of damp where his mouth rested, above her collarbone, and she wipes at it feverishly, ignoring the small part of her that wants to keep his breath against her skin for as long as she can. She leaves as soon as he has fallen into a restless sleep. 

She heads to the girls room, because she has missed dinner and they will have food. They share a room, all of them. A big room with their beds pushed together, and some of their books filched from the vault, and the piano with wonky keys. When Furiosa had told them they could have their own rooms, they had looked surprised, like the thought had never crossed their minds. Perhaps it is a comfort for them still. To feel they are not alone in the beehive of the Citadel. 

They are all there, sitting around a table; Cheedo is lying on her bed, Dag dandles the baby Angharad on her knee. Furiosa takes her place with them, and Capable pushes over a bowl; vegetable soup, thin and watery. They need to get a trap line set up, not that there is much to catch, not that they could ever catch enough. Furiosa eats a few mouthfuls, trying to ignore the way they are staring at her. Gossip travels fast, she thinks. 

“We heard you were dragging a strange man to your room,” Dag says, finally breaking a few minutes later. 

“What do you need a _man_ for?” Toast asks, wrinkling her nose.

“Did you kill him?” Cheedo asks from her bed, and Furiosa smiles.

Capable says nothing, but her eyes are as sharp as ever, and Furiosa wonders if she’s already worked out that it’s Max. Probably. Maybe they all have. Furiosa finishes her soup in silence, then pushes the bowl away, and looks at her girls. 

“Max came back,” she says. 

The girls all sag with relief. Capable smiles. Toast rolls her eyes. Dag puts a finger in the baby's mouth and it coos and gurgles. Over on the bed, Cheedo sits up. 

“Is he staying this time?” she asks. 

Furiosa shrugs. She fumbles with the belts and buckles that keep her prosthetic in place, a new one, not as good as the old one, but serviceable. It keeps her on her bike. She puts it on the table when it’s loose and rubs at the stump of her left arm, where the metal digs in and grit from the desert gets stuck. It clears her head sometimes, to take it off, like peeling off dead skin or picking at a scab.

“You should make him stay,” Cheedo carries on insistently.

“He’ll stay if he finds a reason to,” Furiosa says, a careful reply, because the girls run with anything they are given.

Toast snorts into her water glass, and Dag glares at Furiosa so fiercely she has to smile. 

“You’re all the reason he needs,” says Capable, breaking her silence, and Furiosa’s smile dies.

She gets to her feet, and gathers up her arm, and straps it back on. She feels too exposed suddenly, with these women she calls her sisters. She is tired, she reasons, and she needs to check on Max, and she needs to check in with the night scouts, and she needs to do a thousand other things. The girls watch her with identical expressions of innocence, and she loves them, she _loves_ them, but she can’t spend another moment with them.

“Goodnight,” she says, and she leaves.

Furiosa climbs to the top of the Citadel. To the room that used to house the Milking Mothers and now is just a lookout. The threat of Gastown and the Bullet Farm is gone now, or quieted at least, but the mirrors still hang, and the lookout room always has someone in it. It’s Tint tonight, one of the Wretched, one of the no-longer-Wretched, a young kid with sharp eyes and missing fingers. He’d been the one who found Max, and Furiosa is glad he’s there.

“Quiet?” she asks him, and he smiles, nods.

“As an empty engine, boss.” 

Furiosa leans against the wall, peers out across the desert. The fires set at the top of the other watchtowers, built after the Citadel broke it’s siege, are bright against the velvet blue of the night.

“When you were patrolling this morning, when you saw...the man, did you speak to him?”

“Nope. Kept him in my sight for awhile, heard him call your name a couple times, came to get you.” 

“He said my name?” She hadn’t thought he even knew it, though she wasn’t surprised by it exactly, he didn’t miss much. It just felt...strange. Like he had seen some part of her she hadn’t known was visible.

“Like he was a drowning man and your name was air,” says Tint with satisfaction, earning himself a glare from Furiosa. “Sorry boss. Is he the one who helped you with Old Joe? Is he family?”

“Yes,” Furiosa says quietly, and she tells herself she’s only answering one of his questions.

With a nod to Tint, she leaves. She makes her way to the watchtowers and the other scouts slowly, relishing the cool night air. It’s a still night, and beautiful, star-scattered, and she is reminded of another night like this, far across the wasteland. Max had spent that night in the rig, separate from the rest of them. _Hope is a mistake_ , he’d said. She wonders often what had changed his mind when he came after them the next morning. She wonders what he will think of the Citadel now, if he’ll even be sane enough to see it.

The rest of the watchtower scouts give similar reports to Tint, and eventually Furiosa heads inside. Maybe Max has left already, she thinks, maybe he is not half dead in her bed with a cuff around one wrist and missing fingernails and rope burns around his neck. She stops by the kitchens and steals a canteen of soup, just in case.

He is there, of course, and he’s managed to get himself underneath the quilt. He twitches in his sleep, and his hands are curled fists, and the cuff at his wrist rattles. Furiosa touches her neck absently, imagines there is a mark there, like a burn, where his lips had touched. Frowning, she reaches around to the back of her neck to Joe’s brand, to remind herself it isn’t something she wants, to be marked by a man.

She sits on the edge of the bed and he comes awake immediately, wild eyed and clenched-fisted. She does not flinch. When he realises it's her, he relaxes, just a little, and his eyelids drift half closed.

“I bought you some soup,” she says, holding the canteen out in front of her. He stares at her hand, the canteen, and his eyes flick once, to her face, and away. He takes the bottle.

Furiosa stays silent while he drinks the soup. She thinks about where she will sleep, it would be cruel to turn him out of her room now. It might even push him into leaving entirely. She lights a lantern and the flame casts ghostly shadows across Max’s face. He is too thin. The bones stand out of his face in a way they hadn’t before, though he must have been similarly starved then. She wonders again what had happened to him and squares her jaw to the question, turns away from his shadows and his bones. 

“Thanks,” he grunts when he’s done, putting the canteen on the floor. 

“You can sleep here,” Furiosa says, though he hadn’t asked.

“And you?” he asks, gruff, not meeting her eye. 

“I’ll sleep here too,” she says, surprising herself. “There’s room, it’s late.” 

Max is silent, and still, for a long moment. Then he shrugs, an awkward gesture that looks wrong on him, in her room, in the dark, lit by flames. Furiosa focuses on taking off her boots, and her arm, and she climbs over Max because she likes to sleep near the window. She keeps all of her clothing on. She thinks of the girls in their beds pushed together, and she thinks of nights spent with others in the wasteland, keeping each other warm. This is one of the necessities of this world. She relaxes slightly, and turns on her side, away from Max, and tugs the blanket over her shoulder. Max blows out the lantern, and he settles next to her, making small noises of comfort and arranging his damaged limbs. He is warm, he _radiates_ heat, and Furiosa falls asleep, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, she doesn’t dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So i accidentally kept writing for this. I'm not sure where it will go but it's gonna be nice. maybe. well. probably not always. it's getting too fluff-lite as it is. thank you for reading!


	3. Chapter 3

Furiosa wakes to bright sunlight and Max’s hand at her throat. For a moment she forgets who he is and who she is and where they are, and mumbling sleep-drunk nonsense, she moves closer to his warmth. When the hand spanning the width of her throat tightens, the web between his thumb and forefinger pressing hard against her windpipe, she knows that she has made a mistake. She throws herself backwards, out of his grip, but he follows, and his eyes are glassy and unfocused and she knows then that he does not know who she is. She tucks her knees into her chest and kicks outwards, hitting him in the stomach. He tumbles off the bed, disappearing from sight with a grunt. Furiosa stays frozen, pressed against the window, her fists clenched in readiness. She slides her hand down the side of the bed to the gun hidden there. There are guns secreted in every room she uses. She does not want to shoot him.

“Max?” she calls out carefully. “It’s me. It’s Furiosa.”

There is no response but she can hear him breathing, ragged and torn, like his breath is being ripped from him. Stolen. She tightens her hold on the gun, brings it up from behind the bed, levels it in front of her. 

“Tell me something, fool, or I’ll shoot you,” she grits out, and she wants to shut her eyes, she wants to go back to warmth and to sunlight and to sleep again. Back to a time when he was just a fool to her. A thousand years ago. 

“Don’t.”

Furiosa’s hand is shaking and she tightens her grip again, stills herself with force. 

“Are you going to attack me again?” She asks, and her voice is steel.

There is a long pause. She can hear him moving, but she can’t see him yet. 

“No,” he says, finally, and his voice is heavy and tired and thick with guilt. Furiosa takes her finger from the trigger, but she does not put the gun down.

He gets to his feet then, rising slowly and carefully, he might be blown to pieces if he moves too fast. His shoulders are hunched forward; he looks like he’s trying to fold himself in half. His eyes skitter across the bed, the rumpled blanket, the gun Furiosa is holding. Then Furiosa herself, sprawled across the bed with a gun in her hand. Her lap, her hand, her arms and shoulders. He does not look at her face, he does not meet her eyes, but he can see her now, she knows that instantly. His eyes have lost their cloudy, sleep-dead look. The cuff at his hand rattles as he clenches and unclenches his fists. 

“What was that?” she asks. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. _I’m so sorry_ , he had said before he’d reinflated her lung. _Sorry_ , before he’d given her his blood. She wonders what he will give her now. She slides the gun back into it’s hiding place.

“Were you dreaming?” 

“Yes,” he says shortly, and he does meet her eyes then, and she almost wishes he hadn't. There is blood in his eyes, blood and death and fear; fear most of all. He gestures at her, and she frowns, and he presses his hand to his own throat, looks away, and she understands.

“Not even bruised,” she says slowly, pressing her fingertips to her pulse then turning her hand to him, like her clean palm is proof she is unharmed. 

“I’m _sorry_ ,” he says again, his voice sounding caught on the phrase. 

“I know.”

Max keeps looking to the door like she is something to escape from, and he tugs at the cuff at his wrist, and he hisses when the cold metal hits the place where his fingernails used to be. She will have to bind them with something. Dag might have some herb for healing, and Spoke might know what to do about infection. They are new wounds, new tortures, ten days old at the most. She gets to her feet, and he moves back quickly so they do not accidentally touch.

“Do you sleep better alone?” she asks. 

“No,” he says, hardly a word, an expression of air, a noise in the back of his throat.

Furiosa thinks that he had helped her sleep dreamless with his presence, and she had turned him to violence. Furiosa thinks that she cannot keep someone like him in the Citadel. Not as he is. Not shivering with death at every noise. Maybe he knows that, maybe that’s why he left the first time. She thinks of him strapped, veins and chains, to the hood of a car. She thinks of him disappearing against the tide of a crowd.

“Your hands need looking at,” she says, and she straps her arm in place. 

Max follows her silently through the winding halls of the Citadel. He flinches away from the walls sometimes, and he drags his hand across the chiselled out places where Joe’s skulls used to be. The Citadel is a place where part of him was stolen, for all that it had been his suggestion to turn it into their Green Place. The Citadel is a place where part of all of them was stolen, but he never intended to stay.

She takes him to Dag’s herb garden. As she grew with pregnancy, she had become unable to help with the tending of the larger crops, and had spent her times with the seedlings, strengthening them in windscreen walled greenhouses and then, when they were big enough, giving them up to be planted outside under the sun. The herb garden is just one room of many; a corner filled with spirals of broken concrete crammed with compost and sprayed with water. The room smells like nothing else in the world, fresh and sharp and alive. Even Furiosa finds herself visiting it more often than she needs to. 

Dag is there, her hands covered in dirt, with the baby Angharad strapped to her back, and Cheedo is there too, gathering basil leaves to take to Spoke to crush into salves for insect stings. Furiosa doesn’t take Max to Spoke first because the old Vuvalini likes to know that her patients have tried everything else before coming to her. Using blood and linen and sewing stitches are a last resort, they don’t have the resources to pretend they're a hospital. Furiosa doesn’t think that herbs will do much for the fingernails, but Dag might have something for the burns.

Cheedo smiles when they enter the garden. Dag squints. Angharad gurgles. Max nods at them all and presses his lips together firmly.

“Do you think you could look at Max before we go and see Spoke?” Furiosa asks, stepping around patches of dirt and trowels made of scrap metal. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Dag asks.

“Did you sleep in Furiosa’s room?” Cheedo asks. 

Max holds out his hands in response, and stares at the ceiling fixedly. Dag wrinkles her nose and turns away. Cheedo peers at the raw and wrinkled and weeping patches of skin where his fingernails used to be. She shakes her head. 

“You’ll just need to keep them dry, keep sand out of them,” she says. “Spoke might trade you bandages, but you’re not dying so you won’t get them for free.” 

“He has burns too, around his neck.” 

Max obeys the silent order, pulling at the collar of his shirt, exposing the ring of rope burns. His eyes remain firmly on the ceiling. He is not one to lay himself bare like that. Furiosa is surprised that he even does it, and pleased. 

“You can take some aloe,” Dag says. “ _Did_ he sleep in your room?” 

“Thanks,” Furiosa says, ignoring the other question. 

Dag grins crookedly while she cuts a thick leaf of aloe vera at the base and expertly peels it open. Max takes the leaf and sniffs at it, and frowns, and slathers it around his neck, under the collar. Dag cuts a couple more leaves and Max takes them, holds them awkwardly in front of him. Cactuses and succulents are one thing they have in abundance.

“Thank you,” he says, and he offers Dag something close to a smile. 

They go to Spoke next, and Cheedo comes with them, carrying her basket of basil. 

“If you give her that aloe she’ll make you a better burn cream.”

“This is enough,” Max says, and he shoves the aloe leaves into his pocket where they jut out crazily, somehow absurd, this spot of green amongst the weathered browns that make him up. Furiosa smiles.

Spoke looks at his hands and tuts and looks at his neck and tuts and Max won’t show her his leg but she tuts at that too. She gives him a roll of coarsely woven bandage and some ointment and he does give her the aloe after all because he has nothing else. Spoke would have taken nothing, Furiosa knows this and Cheedo knows this and Max knows this, but she takes the leaves when they’re offered and no one says a thing. 

They eat in Furiosa’s room, and Max pulls everything into smaller pieces before putting it in his mouth. Furiosa wonders if something is wrong with his teeth, but he doesn't say anything and she doesn't ask. The closest anyone gets to dentistry is pliers anyway. They sit next to each other, but they don’t touch. He is still half-caught in his nightmares; he twitches when the light changes. Furiosa’s dead only speak to her when she’s sleeping; her mother and Angharad and the Vuvalini. Miss Giddy who they had left behind with a shotgun. Miss Giddy who had died in pursuit. Max’s dead walk in daylight.

“When are you leaving?” she asks, because he is too dangerous for the Citadel (but no more dangerous than she is).

“When I can drive,” Max says, frowning at his hands. “Soon.”

“I’m scout tonight, you can use my bed. I won’t be back til morning.” 

“I’ll come,” he says, and it’s settled. 

Furiosa spends the rest of the day in the chop shop, building vehicles out of other vehicles with ex-War Boys and ex-Wretched. Max finds a seat in the sun, and he takes apart his shotgun, cleans it, and puts it back together again. She cuts the cuff of his hand and he rubs at his raw wrist and she touches his knuckles. He is almost always in her sight, and it’s a comfort, somehow, like if he disappeared, so would the sun, and the green, and everything. 

When it gets dark, velvet soft and quiet, they walk together up the concrete-cut stairs to the watchtower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so, i was thinking about compost for gardening and i the Citadel i imagine they could use human waste + food scraps. they are probably very diligent with food scraps. anyway. thank you for reading! there are fluffier bits to come.


	4. Chapter 4

The night is warm and blue. Furiosa sits on a table, bathed in moonlight. Max is on a seat the salvagers pulled from the dead rig, missing springs and padding and burnt in places, and he’s kneading at his left thigh with the heels of his palms. It feels somehow unreal, under quiet and stars, like they’ve left the their dead world behind, and Furiosa tries not to blink in case she is thrown back into something terrible. She flashes signals periodically, and the replies wink back at them from all around, every watchtower in every tall place. She checks the rifle is loaded, she checks again, Max swallows some noise of crisis; she could not be anywhere else but a green place in a sea of yellow, not really. 

“How’s your leg?” Furiosa asks, when the silence gets too much.

“Stairs,” Max mutters, shrugging, his eyes fixed on his task. 

Furiosa nods, leans back against the wall. She feels like she should unstrap her metal arm, do something similar, stretch out the red raw folds in her skin from a prosthetic that has not yet worn in properly, but she doesn’t because she is a watcher tonight, and she should be ready for unlikely violence. 

It is only scattered gangs that attack them now, spiked cars and circular saws. Rabble that break themselves against the walls. The green place is spitting out warriors, they have Toast to thank for that, and Capable who gentles the wretched and gives them a choice. The ones who choose to fight do so for something like love, and it never stops surprising Furiosa that people can still do that. She can barely look at them.

Capable visits them, and Furiosa climbs off the table, and Max gets to his feet looking unbalanced and guarded. He has not bandaged his hands yet, and the small pot of salve disappeared into some pocket as soon as he got it. Furiosa smiles at Capable and takes the warm thermos offered. Capable leans against the wall, fiddling with the the string on the binoculars she carries around her neck. Always. Capable who watches. 

“Max,” she says, smiling at him, and he nods, makes a sharp movement with his hand like he wants to do something more, but he doesn’t. 

“It’s quiet,” Furiosa says. “You don’t have to check every night.” 

“ _You_ do,” Capable says, and she straightens up, moves to the window, peers out into darkness. There are no lights out on the desert. “I like it.” 

“Cheedo thinks you will fall.”

“Cheedo thinks everyone will fall,” Capable smiles. She is the only one of the girls who has used the bridges between the rocks. She travels between towers on rope and plank, smiling into the wind. Not even Toast can match this bravery. Angharad had fallen. “How long will you be here, Max?” 

“A while.”

“Good.” 

Capable steps back from the window, presses a kiss to Furiosa’s cheek, and disappears down the way she came. She will go to the other towers now, just as Furiosa had done the night before, and she will smile at the wretched she has pulled up so high, and they will love her. Max sits back down. Furiosa pulls herself back up onto the table, twists the top off the thermos, smiles at the scent of herbs, some tea or another that Dag has attempted to brew. Invariably disgusting, but warm.

“The ones who Joe left behind, they look at her...look at all the girls, like they’re precious, breakable,” she says, pulling a finger through the steam from the tea, turning it to swirls in the air.

“And how do they look at you?” 

Furiosa smiles, draws in a breath that shakes only slightly. 

“Like I killed their God,” she says, and she takes a sip of tea, closing her eyes against the steam.

Max doesn’t say anything to that, and gradually the silence dips into something more comfortable, and Furiosa feels less like she might slip out of her skin and disappear. They pass the tea back and forth between them, and Max grimaces at the taste, and Furiosa laughs. The night stretches, the bright moonlight fades. Furiosa watches Max, and Max watches her shadow.

“Has she been...” Max starts, and he frowns, tilts his hands against each other like he’s feeling out the question. “...since the boy?”

“She spends her time with the children,” Furiosa says, knowing exactly who he means. “She teaches them...she teaches them that they belong to themselves. She never got to teach the boy that, he thought he belonged to her.”

“Comes with the territory,” says Max. “Love,” he adds. He looks uncomfortable, like he’s surprised that he spoke at all. The word sounds like something physical when he says it, like he could reach out and pluck love from the air. 

“Not really a place for it here,” Furiosa says. She feels like she’s holding her breath, and the words come out too loud and strained, pressed against her teeth with her tongue.

Max looks at her sharply, and she looks away. Out to the scrap of night visible to them, and the splash of stars. 

“Why haven’t you wrapped your hands?” she asks him, when it seems safe to speak.

“I can’t shoot if i can’t get a finger to the trigger.” 

“You don’t need to shoot anyone,” Furiosa says. “Not here.”

“And you’re ready for a fight a hundred feet up.”

Furiosa sighs. There is a knife in her boot and one at her hips and there are guns in every room that she could reach in the space of a breath. Wasteland guzzlers have broken themselves against the Citadel, but the peace between the mines will always be strained and it is hard to take the war out of a war boy. Even for Capable. 

“No bandages then, give me the salve.” 

Furiosa gets to her feet, takes the steps to reach him, and kneels down beside him. He pulls the small pot out of a pocket and hands it to her without a word. It is green and cloudy and smells like something sharp. Max is still watching her shadow, he is holding himself tightly, wound up all the way, like only the set of his jaw is keeping his teeth from breaking. Furiosa holds out her hand, palm up, and he gives her his with only the briefest of hesitations, sliding their palms together. Furiosa curls her fingers around his wrist. She can feel the way he is trembling just under the skin, set to split; she can feel his pulse. 

There are three fingernails missing on his right hand, and two and a half on his left. He hisses when she dabs the ointment on the wounds. He bites his lip. When she has tended to them all, she lets go of his hand, but does not move from his side. He stills, he shuts his eyes briefly, he relaxes back against the broken seat. Furiosa knows that these marks are unanswered questions.

“Why did they do this?” she asks him quietly. “What did they ask?”

“They asked about you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has taken awhile because I had uni assignments, but they are done now! so everything will be mad max for most of the near future i think. thank you for reading!!


	5. Chapter 5

The Citadel is not the Green Place. Furiosa knows this and Spoke knows this and Jedda knows this. They are the only Vuvalini left and they try not to cling to something that is so far gone. Furiosa had only known it as a girl; she had been young when she was stolen. The Furiosa of the Green Place was a speed demon with sun-striped hair and two flesh hands with scars on both. She never left the side of a girl called Areta, later called Valkyrie for the war boys she sent to Valhalla, and even later than that unburied on the Fury Road. Furiosa had thought this green part of herself was dead, a child with hollow insides, but then sand stretched out under her wheels, and Max slept next to her, and she thought perhaps some piece still remained. The Citadel is not the Green Place, but it’s not a scar left behind by Immortan Joe either.

The girls try hard. They build a reservoir, and they turn War Boys free, and they grow things. They avoid the Vault. Toast disappears if Joe is mentioned. Capable has nightmares. Dag bites the skin off her knuckles and lumpy scars form across the joints. Cheedo sometimes forgets she has a voice. But they bring Furiosa back, piece by piece, and when Cheedo’s hair is in braids she remembers Areta, and when Dag grows things she remembers the Green Place. It is an uphill climb and the girls pretend it’s easy.

Furiosa takes the Vault when they deny it _because_ it isn’t the Green Place. It reminds her that such a place doesn’t exist anymore. It is easy to think that hope is a mistake. Hadn’t Max had left after all? But the girls try, and they grow, and Furiosa does the harder thing, and takes the Citadel for what it is.

“They asked about you,” says Max, and Furiosa closes her eyes like it will quiet the roaring in her head. This will be what takes the Citadel from them, she thinks, like the poisoned water took the Green Place. “You have time.”

“Time,” Furiosa almost laughs. “Until what? What did you tell them?”

“Nothing.”

“ _Liar_.” 

Max blinks, and blinks again, and brushes his hand across his cheekbone like he’s swiping at flies. Furiosa can see the feral edges in him, under his skin and clamoring to get out. He is telling the truth, she knows he is, and she huffs out her irritation and gets to her feet. She moves to the cutout window and she can hear him following her closely, though he doesn’t touch her. She focuses on the dark sky. Behind her he is immovable and solid and certain like nothing in their world truly is. She forces herself to remember that he _left_. 

“Who are they?”

“You said you were treating with them. I told them you would not break.” 

Furiosa wants to scream, and she bites down hard instead. Her hands form fists at her sides, metal and flesh. It’s not surprising, not really, it had been too easy breaking their first siege. Toast and Spoke and Jedda had organised the few warriors they had, and Cheedo and Dag had dealt with rations and water, and Capable had told the crowds of people, in a voice like a ringing bell, _you are not things_. Furiosa had been healing still, and when they told her that Gastown and the Bullet Farm had surrendered, she believed it. Because it was easy to believe in some small victory after so much loss. Later, when emissaries had come, with bullets and guzz, talking of treaties, it had been easy to believe that too.

“You should have told me earlier,” she says, and her voice sounds strained and vicious and brittle as bone.

“I wasn’t sure it was true until you asked,” says Max, moving to stand next to her, frowning at the green stains on his fingertips. “Things have a way of...of _hiding_...in my head.”

“Do you know more of their plans? Why did they let you escape?” 

“They hung me,” he says. “It was a bad knot or...or someone was smiling on me. I didn’t die. A boy came back at night and cut me down.”

“A _boy_.” 

“He said he remembered you and he said he remembered Toast, when she was a kid there.” 

Furiosa feels suddenly unable to breathe, and she tugs at the straps at her waist, making the leather creak in protest. She unbuckles her arm and lets it drop, and she leans out as far as she can into the night air, and she breathes it in until the stars stop dancing in front of her eyes. Until her skin stops feeling about to split. Until Max rests a hand against her lower back, and it grounds her. 

“You have time,” he says, and she imagines she can feel the rumble of his voice coming through his fingertips. 

“We can outlast them,” she whispers.

Furiosa wants to start right then. She will pull apart cars on her own, weld them together, build walls and dig trenches. She will ride to Gastown and to the Bullet Farm and she will burn them into dust. The Citadel is not the Green Place but it is hers. She moves from under Max’s hand and he makes a noise of protest that she ignores. There are a thousand things to do. They need to be airtight. They must be able to break bigger things than raiders on motorbikes. 

“Do you take food to them?”

“No,” Furiosa murmurs, and she picks up her arm from where it fell. “We have no rig.”

“They come to you then. When?”

“The day of the full moon,” she says shortly, and she pulls the belts that hold her arm on a notch too tight. It is dangerous to feel comfortable in this world. She has been careless. “Six days.” 

“A lifetime,” says Max.

“I have to talk to the Vuvalini,” says Furiosa.

“You should rest.”

“I’m on watch.”

“I’ll take it.” 

Max is looking at her from underneath his eyelashes, like he knows she is going to object, and she bites her tongue. _Six days_. After the first siege Cheedo had done most of the talking, with Capable at her side. Toast was too angry and Dag too pregnant and too wired. The Bullet Farmer was gone but there was Toothsome to think of, the girl who kept razor blades in her hair. The People Eater was gone too but Dural was alive, and he called himself the hollow man. It had made Furiosa proud, to think that Cheedo had stood her ground in front of them, but now it turns her stomach. 

There _is_ time though. The night is velvet still and Max is watching her with hooded eyes and she might sleep a few hours before the six days start. Her girls are strong and the Citadel is _strong_ and the Vuvalini couldn’t fight the poisoned water but they can fight this. There is the skeleton of a wall across the gates already. There are the enormous crates of stones used as ballast for the lifts. There are the lifts themselves, most of them disassembled. Immortan Joe had stolen the Citadel a long time ago, but these leaders, newly blooded, are glass to break without even the imagined medals Joe had pinned to his chest. _It will be a hard day_ , she thinks. _Together_ , she thinks.

“Wake me before it gets light,” she tells Max, and she takes the seat he left, and she tugs her knees to her chest, and she closes her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Right so. This is less fluffy. I suppose. I actually have some idea of where it's going to go now though! Dural and Jedda are both Aboriginal Australian names, according to google. Jedda comes from a word that means bird and Dural is a burning hollow tree. Ok! Thank you so much for reading lovely people!


	6. Chapter 6

Max wakes Furiosa before dawn, as he said he would. It takes only a palm pressed to her shoulder to bring her out of her dreams of blood, and he steps back from her when her eyes open. Both of them remember the previous morning’s violence, and Max’s expression is carefully blank. Furiosa gets to her feet and moves to the window. The light is grey outside, the air is getting warmer, there are storms on the horizon. Everything she learned the night before surfaces. Six days.

They do not speak as Furiosa moves around the room. He just shifts with her, out of her way, and then he stands by the doorway and folds up the cuffs of his shirt. He still has his shotgun, holstered under his armpit, this man who woke her with a hand at her throat. She needs to find him a room with a lock. He cannot stay with her, not even if they move together effortlessly. Both of them have tightly held violence under their skin. Cleaning him of the desert seems a thousand days ago.

When Jedda comes to relieve Furiosa of her watch, as the grey air gets lighter, she tells her briefly what Max had said in the dark. Jedda nods, and glances at Max, and nods again. Her expression is indecipherable. Furiosa feels disconnected from her, as she often does around the Vuvalini, even now. 

“We’ve faced worse things,” Jedda says, and Furiosa shrugs, shakes out her limbs, and heads down the stairs. 

Max follows her, and she pretends not to notice the way his left leg is stiff, the way the corner of his mouth pulls down when he bends his knee. There will be time for healing after the storm. _Six days_. Maybe he will leave before the seventh is over. She has to speak to her girls, explain it to them. She has to get her people out to finish the walls. Capable will be awake in any case, she is always up before dawn, helping with the children. 

“You ought to sleep,” she tells Max, as they near the Vault. “Use my rooms while I...me and the others, think of something.”

“I’ll be alright.”

“It would be better you weren’t there. You’re not...this isn’t your place.”

There is a silence, and Max’s eyes narrow, very slightly, and then he tilts his chin at her, takes the blow. She looks away from him, she looks at the skulls gouged out of the walls instead. She curses herself for feeling guilty for telling the truth. This is something he knows as well as she does. He left, after all. When she looks back at him, his expression is softer, but skittery around the edges; the shadows never sit still on his face. 

“Sleep,” she says again. “I’ll come wake you in a few hours.” 

Max nods, presses his lips together, nods again. He makes a jerky movement, like he means to take her hand, but he stops himself short and the air between them seems suddenly thick, and suffocating. Furiosa rubs her hand across the back of her neck, pinching at the scars there. The brand on _his_ neck had been scored through with a knife, she’d seen it when he changed shirts, easier to reach than the words on his back. As much as she hated hers, she hadn’t taken that step. Maybe it was something to do with living with it for so long.

“Go to your girls,” Max says, finally, and his voice is a croaking rasp, something pulled from his throat unwillingly. He turns away just as she does, him towards the Vault and her to Capable’s nursery. She is acutely aware of every step she takes away from him. 

“Six days,” she murmurs, something like a prayer, a reminder of what she should be thinking of. 

The nursery is several rooms in a honeycomb. The blackboard, and chairs, and some books, have been moved from the Vault into one of the rooms, and Capable teaches children their letters. There are rows of beds lined in foam from the seats of dead vehicles. Coloured clay is daubed across walls, childish finger paintings; smiles, and leaves, and the sun, the sun, the sun. Furiosa avoids this place, towers and rifles are easier to understand.

Capable is awake, as Furiosa knew she would be. She has a wriggling baby in one arm, and there is a toddler pressing dirty handprints to her shirt. When she sees Furiosa she gives the baby to Cherish, one of the women who used to be a milking mother, one who chose to use her milk for Wretched babies. Furiosa smiles at her, and she shrugs the baby over her shoulder, and whisks the toddler away by it’s dirty hand. 

“What’s happened?” Capable asks, her gaze steady, and sharp, as always.

“Toothsome and Dural...they won’t make our treaty. They want the Citadel.” 

“And they’ll try when they come on their food run.” 

“We need to get the walls finished.”

“I can talk to the War Boys. You should talk to Toast.”

“You wanted hope.” 

Capable does not look away. Furiosa bites her tongue to keep more foolishness from spilling out of her mouth. _Hope is a mistake_. She brushes her fingers down the cords and spokes of her metal arm, clearing out tiny specks of sand, and dust.

“We have it still,” Capable murmurs quietly. “And we will have it until the last, just as you will.” 

Furiosa thinks she would believe that from Capable, more than anyone, but it still sits awkwardly under her ribs. But she had been strong when she was needed, when they first left the Citadel, and she would be strong again. She was now. But it was exhausting, keeping so many things from falling. Six days, and then she can sleep again. _Six days_. And then Max will be gone and she will stop doubting her priorities. 

She leaves Capable behind with instructions to start back at the wall. Shift work, and double water rations. Killing people with work was something Joe had done. Toast sleeps late, but she wakes to Furiosa’s call, and she goes down to the armoury to clean guns, keep them smooth, and count bullets. Cheedo and Spoke take inventory of needles, and thread, and hemp bandages, and salves. Cheedo gives Furiosa a coarse bread roll, and pats her hand, and sends her on her way, and Furiosa smiles, and is able to relax, just a little bit. 

Dag takes the news worst. Angharad is on her hip, and her fingers, and bare feet, are green. She chews on her knuckles as she listens to Furiosa, and Angharad pulls on her hair. 

“They can’t have her,” she says, around a mouthful of her hands. 

“No,” Furiosa agrees. “They can’t have any of us.” 

“I’ll burn everything down before they reach this high.” 

“No you won’t,” Furiosa says, trying to be gentle. Angharad burbles, and Dag shrugs her higher up her hip.

“I’ll poison the water,” Dag insists, her eyes skimming across plants, her fingers curling into her palms like fern fronds. “I know how to.” 

“Save your poison for the arrows,” says Furiosa. “Give it to Toast. Though I hope it won’t come to that.”

“It always does,” Dag hisses, and she turns away.

All at once she is Dag as she was when she was a wife; too tall, and curled in on herself, and angry, and wild. She is not the green girl, the funny girl, the mother the Citadel is slowly making her. Her hand tightens around Angharad like she is glued to the child, just as she was once glued to Cheedo. Angharad screams, and wriggles, and Dag wilts, just a little, and eases her grip, and turns back, looking desperate.

“We won’t break,” says Furiosa, and she reaches out a hand, touches Dag on the shoulder, and brushes her palm over Angharad’s burnt gold hair. 

“No,” Dag agrees, though she doesn’t sound convinced. “Angharad won’t let us.” 

Furiosa doesn’t ask which Angharad she means, because it doesn’t matter. It’s both, probably; their fallen girl with dynamite eyes, and the baby who was not a warlord. It’s true, though Furiosa is tired still. They will build walls, and shine the triggers on guns, and Dag won’t have to burn anything, or poison anything, or throw her hope away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took so long, i am terrible. i'll try to be better. i'm now @oneangryshot on tumblr, come say hi! thank you all for reading!


	7. Chapter 7

Everything moves quickly then. Furiosa wants to pull on the threads she’s losing, gather everything back into her arms, stop the Citadel from unraveling away from her. But she is one person in a thousand, and war is coming. While Capable gathers up volunteers for the wall, and Cheedo switches from burn salves to bandages, and Toast and her black thumbs hammer metal flat and bind it strong with ugly lines of fire, Furiosa walks the halls. She thinks she should be helping all of them. She thinks she should be making bullets, or building bombs. She is not sure what changed since telling them, but she can’t bring herself to go to them anymore. They are proof that she has failed, and when the Citadel is burnt and empty, in six days, that will be proof too.

Max is in her room still, the vault, sleeping in her bed, and she goes to him instead. He wakes to her hand on his shoulder, like she had done that morning, and he doesn’t come awake violently, but she keeps a knife in her metal hand anyway. He doesn’t say anything. He sits up, and she eases herself down onto the bed next to him. 

“They’re building,” she says, frowning at the particles of dust catching sunlight in the air. 

“And you?”

“I should be with them,” she sighs, leaning back on her hands. “I’m worried about Dag.”

Max shrugs, his shoulder brushing hers, and rubs a hand across the back of his neck. It must scrape against the rope burns too roughly, because he winces, and then his hands are in his lap again. They are still stained green with salve. Furiosa shuts her eyes. She thinks he ought to bandage his hands and the burns, but she knows him well enough to know how that conversation will go. 

“She’s got a kid now,” Max says then, his voice cracking the air. “She’ll be worrying about other things.” 

Furiosa makes a noise of agreement, but doesn’t open her eyes. She should be digging spiked trenches. She should be lining the fury road in death. She should be with Dag, giving the girl comfort and lies. Her limbs feel heavy, and she fights the urge to unstrap her arm and go to sleep. She gets to her feet.

“I’m taking a bike out,” she says, making the decision just as she voices it. “Will you come with me?” 

Max doesn’t answer, but he stands up next to her, and that’s close enough. They go to the kitchens first to beg bread and fruit, and then they go to Toast. She is in goggles, with flames in her hands, welding metal together for the wall, and she stops only when one of her men punches her on the shoulder. Toast with a streak of oil across her cheek and gunpowder staining her fingers. She squints at Max, and nods at Furiosa, and takes off her gloves. 

“You taking stuff to Capable?” 

“We’re going out,” Furiosa says. “I want to spike the roads.” 

Toast grins, and Furiosa and Max follow her down into the ground level cavern that holds the tools, and the forge. Toast had settled back into the Citadel the easiest of the girls. She’d only had to attach herself to one of the older black thumbs to find her place. It had been months of questions and burnt fingers and broken machines but now she knows her way around the insides of any number of vehicles. She is respected, and she has her own workshop, and she can build a bike from the ground up, and Furiosa can never find the words to explain how that makes her feel. Proud, and scared, and lonely, and a thousand other things.

“I have tripwires and pit spikes, what do you want?”

“All of it,” Furiosa says, matching Toast’s smile

“I’ll map it,” says Max quietly. “To keep your people from setting anything off.” 

_Our people_ , Furiosa thinks, but that’s a lie. 

“A smart man,” Toast says, looking at Furiosa with one eyebrow quirked. “I’d never have picked it.” 

Furiosa and Max take out one of the bikes. Max’s hands are still too delicate to grip anything tightly, and they sit light at her waist, and the sand the wheels spit up hits the sun and turns gold. They stop at various points along the road. Well travelled routes, worn hard and straight. Furiosa strings coiled metal across it, daubed in clay to match the road, indistinguishable if you’re travelling fast enough. Max counts miles and makes notes with thinned oil on a scrap of fabric. Furiosa wonders why he hadn’t asked for engine grease when he’d made his other map, the Citadel pricked out in his own blood, but she doesn’t mention it. They line shallow pits in jagged pieces of metal, sharp nails, things for killing. They cover deeper, wider pits with sacking, and cover the sacking with sand. 

“They might be watching this,” says Max, when the sun is at it’s highest, and they’ve stopped for water, and fruit. 

“They might be,” Furiosa agrees, shading her eyes to look down the road in the direction of Gastown. “But we leave the Citadel, we make runs, it’s not unusual for one of our bikes to be out on the road. They don’t have the height to see what we see.”

Max makes noncommittal noise, shrugs, focuses on pouring water over his injured hands. They are red raw and swollen, crusted with sand from the road. Furiosa frowns, and rummages through the bags strapped across the bike seat. She thinks the gloves were Ace’s, but she can’t be sure. Something had made her keep them anyway, and she is glad of it now. They’re worn, and patched, and the insides are sweat-slick with use, but they’ll keep the sand out. She drops them in Max’s lap.

“If you’re going to help me, you’ll wear these,” she tells him. “Jedda won’t have time to deal with whatever infection you get from sand in the wounds.”

Max looks at them for a long moment, then dries his hands with his shirt, and pulls them on. He stretches out his fingers to fit them, and then curls them back into his palms. Furiosa thinks of how he had looked when she saw him first, only two days ago, burnt by sand and bleeding. He is a different man every time she blinks. He is Max with a cage across his mouth, Max throwing sand into her eyes, Max handing her a gun. Max giving her his blood. 

“You’ll survive this,” he tells her then, and she has to bite her lip to stop herself ripping his head off. This is another Max still. 

“I’ve been cheating death my whole life,” she says instead, her words careful and her voice even. “It has to catch up some time.” 

“Not this time, not after-” he shrugs, drags a gloved finger through the sand.

“Coming this far doesn’t mean we’re safe. It doesn’t meant anything. Not here.”

“But now you have a fortress behind you. Better than a War Rig.”

“It doesn’t _matter_ ,” she insists, glaring at him now, hot with anger and helpless with fear. “It’s six days now, and then what? A hundred? A thousand? I wanted...I wanted...”

“You wanted a green place,” he says gently. “You can still have that.”

“I can’t even...” Furiosa laughs bitterly, draws a hand across her eyes. “I can’t even remember it.” 

Max is silent. Awkwardly, with movements that seem too loud, too sharp, too _much_ , he draws an arm around her, over her shoulders. She can feel him behind her, trembling slightly, held tight as the lines they pulled across the road. She sighs, and lets herself lean into him, and she closes her eyes, and she stops thinking of the road, and of the rocks. Six days is a lifetime.

“It will be a hard day,” she murmurs. 

“It always is.” 

They sit like that until the sun and the sand get uncomfortable. Max pulls his arm away, and they stand, and she wishes she hadn’t given him the gloves; she would like to touch his skin with hers.

“I want to do a couple more further out,” she says instead, and he nods, and they pack everything up, and ride out.

They get back before it’s fully dark, when the sun is smeared across the sky in streaks. They eat with the girls, who are bruised, and exhausted. Cheedo compares her blackened fingernail, injured in a car door, with Max’s missing ones. Dag is quiet, but she doesn’t mention poison, and there are flowers in Angharad’s hair.

Afterwards, Max follows her to her rooms, and neither of them mention it. He doesn’t sleep in her bed, but he takes a blanket and a pillow, and he curls himself up in the room with the pool. It feels too impossible to do anything more than that. He will be gone soon. Perhaps they all will. Furiosa keeps a knife under her pillow and a gun under the bed, and neither of them mention that either. She dreams of the road, and of death, and when she wakes up, Max’s hand isn’t at her throat, and there are five days left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gosh! ok! this came out of nowhere. probably because i have an assignment due. thank you for reading! i love you all. i'm @oneangryshot on tumblr now, say hello!


	8. Chapter 8

In the days that follow, Furiosa feels like she speaks to every person in the Citadel. They come to her in pairs, or alone; the free people who were once milking mothers or wretched or war boys. Some of them pledge their services. A girl with eyes like pools of water tells Furiosa she can shoot through the eye of a needle and Furiosa sends her down to Toast to prove it. Tint brings his father, a bent-over skeleton of a man, and he tells her he knows how to put metal together so it will never break, though he can’t he build it himself, and Furiosa sends him to Capable to prove it. There are a lot of things a thousand-thousand torn-down people can do in four days.

Furiosa doesn’t see Max much except in the evenings. He is helping where he is best, with cars and with guns and with silence. They do not have the time to dig a trench outside the walls but Max gets together a group and they set jagged points out from the base of the wall, so no one can get near without bleeding for it. 

He eats his meals with her though, in the cool of the vault, and afterwards she touches the green salve to his healing fingers. She holds his hand by the base of his wrist, her metal fingers taking nothing from his flesh ones, casting jagged shadows. He keeps his gloves on when he works and she is glad for it. He knows when to be sensible instead of pretending to be indestructible. The burns and bruises at his neck heal badly and Furiosa wonders how long he hung from that bad knot. She touches the hollow at the base of his throat one night and he lets her, but she can feel him swallowing something and he does not stop trembling, not even when her hand is gone.

“You’ll tell me one day,” she says, with three days left, made bold by the deadline running closer. “About your nine lives.” 

The corner of his mouth twitches; almost the beginning of a smile. Furiosa stretches her arms above her head, smothers a yawn, settles her clothing back into place. She needs to do her rounds; it’s an important thing to her, to keep to her routine like the Citadel isn’t so close to collapse. The walls look _good_. They’re not complete, not yet, but they’re strong, and most of them are standing. Toast has amassed an arsenal that would impress even the Bullet Farmer, and perhaps will impress Toothsome too. Cheedo has healing hands and Spoke has needled fingers. Dag has not said anything more about poison, though she sends bottles to Toast, for bullets and arrowheads. 

“We’re out then?” Max asks, getting to his feet, reading her mind in a way that is not quite comfortable. Like an itch she can’t reach. Like the itch she gets in the empty space where her left arm used to be. A phantom limb that she will miss when it’s gone. She feels like that _always_. She shakes her head to clear it, stretches once more, checks the knives at her belt and the leather at her waist, and they head out. 

Cherish, from the nursery, is waiting for them in the room that used to be hers. When she and many others were nothing more than breast milk. She glows under the almost-full moon and she looks scared, and defiant. Furiosa is still uncomfortable around the ones she left behind. The milking mothers had helped her and her girls, had packed Joe’s brides up among crates of produce. They had known there was no place for them on the rig and they helped anyway and Furiosa doesn’t know how to face that sort of selflessness. How to adequately thank them. 

“Is Capable alright?” she asks, the wrong question, but all she can manage. 

“We want to help,” says Cherish. “We’ve found something.” 

“What?”

“A way out.”

For a minute Furiosa doesn't know what she means. For a minute Furiosa feels like she’s trapped again, a wife or a war boy or an imperator. She inhales too deeply and her breast bone aches and then Max’s hand is on her arm and it steadies her.

“A back way?” he asks, and Cherish nods.

“We took a place for ourselves as far from here as we could get,” she says, her voice betraying nothing of what it feels to be back. “There’s a tunnel, hidden, cut into rock, it comes up a ways out west. If it should come to that.”

“If it should come to that,” murmurs Furiosa, like she has already failed. Max is as close to her as he is able, shoulder to hip. “Why are you telling me this? Why not keep it for yourself?”

“Because there are children here,” says Cherish, shrugging. “And old people and sick people. If this doesn’t go our way, they’ll take their chances in the wastes rather than be owned again.”

Furiosa keeps Angharad’s words painted high in the vault because she is not sure she believes them yet. Something about the way her bones sit under her skin, like they’ll never be still, like they don’t belong to her, makes it hard for her to accept that she does not need to explain herself to anyone. Perhaps she hasn’t felt her own since she was taken from the Green Place. But Cherish is looking at her, uncomplicated and honest, and she is saying that there are ways to help people that aren’t steeped in violence.

“Talk to Capable about getting water down there, food, for anyone who wants to leave,” she says quietly. “Talk to Capable about an evacuation plan.” 

Cherish nods, folds her arms, nods again. There is something more she wants to say, Furiosa can see it hovering behind her tongue. She hopes it will not hurt too much.

“We aren’t _asking_ you,” she says, after a beat, and when Furiosa doesn’t respond she nods once more, twists her palms against one another, and is gone.

Furiosa takes her place at the window. It is not a clear night, not a blue night; it is grey and acid green wind is blowing in from some other toxic place somewhere else. She runs her hand down the metal of her arm, the metals cords she sometimes thinks of as veins, muscles, bones. Different material, but part of her like her flesh is. Max stands behind her, not touching her anymore, but there, and silent. 

“There should be someone here,” she says quietly. “It’s someone’s job to be here tonight.” 

“Not yours,” says Max.

“Not mine,” she agrees, sighing, and she feels something inside her click, like a car shifting into gear. _Not mine_ , she thinks, looking across to the twin rocks of the Citadel, enormous and smothered black in the night. This place is hers because she took it back but she does not fit here.

“Come and sleep,” says Max.

She leaves the high tower and goes with Max back to the Vault. He picks up the blanket and pillow from where he’d slept before, stretched out beside the water, and he follows Furiosa to her bed. They don’t speak; Furiosa unstraps her arm and wriggles out of her trousers and Max kicks off his boots and shrugs off his jacket. They lie side by side in the dark. Furiosa has knives an arms length away but it doesn’t seem important anymore. She lets Max move close to her and rest his forehead on her shoulder and his breath is warm on her arm. She turns her head to press her lips to his hairline and she closes her eyes. She dreams of the road.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly every chapter is gonna take ten years at this rate i'm sorry. thank you


	9. Chapter 9

On the last day Capable finds Furiosa amongst the skeletons of cars. She is still hammering out sheets of steel with Toast, patchwork metal for the wall shined bright enough to blind anyone coming, if the sun hits it right. Capable arrives with her face set in stone and Furiosa knows immediately that her girls have come to a decision. She looks at Toast and Toast looks away, pulls her lower lip into her mouth with her teeth, frowns at the planes of rumpled metal under her hands. 

“What do you want me to do?” she asks before Capable can open her mouth. She is expecting blood on her hands. She is expecting violence passed on to her because she is dirty already. 

“We don’t want you at the gates tomorrow,” says Capable, and for a moment Furiosa can’t speak, can’t think. “We want you up on lookout.” 

“On lookout,” she echoes faintly, catching her voice. “But I’m the only one who knows who we’re dealing with.”

“They know you too,” says Toast, looking up. “And I’m betting you’re not on good terms.”

“No one is on good terms with _anyone_ here,” snaps Furiosa, and she is surprised by the desperate edge to her voice. She shakes the glove off her right hand, pulls off her goggles, like taking off these things will make the rest easier. An uncluttered body for an uncluttered mind. She wants to be somewhere else: on the road, drifting into storms. She wishes Max were not in some other cavern matching bullets to guns. She thinks that perhaps she would know what to do with her hands if he were near. He could tell her the best ways to be a soldier in peacetime.

“Furiosa,” says Capable. “You’ll see everything from the lookout and you’ll have your rifle. You’ll have a better shot up high.” 

“They’ll be all torn up from your traps,” says Toast, looking away again. “They might turn tail at that anyway. We can _do_ this.”

Furiosa bites her lip against the denial that threatens to spill. She knows that they can do it, her girls have done harder things. But knowing that they can face a war and letting herself step back are different. She knows that she could say _next time_ or _just_ this once and Capable would gentle her eyes and give her back the gate, but she knows too that now is as good a time as any to be the watcher. She remembers telling Max, as she washed blood from his skin, that the girls were better than her at diplomacy. Perhaps it’s time to make that true. 

“When they came before,” Furiosa starts, wetting her lips, dragging flesh fingers across metal bones. “When they came before, were Toothsome and Dural with them? Was there a woman with razorblades braided into her hair? A man with...a man with burnt skin?” 

“No, only representatives,” says Capable, shaking her head. “But Furiosa it doesn’t matter, they’re all the same. We’ve got to show them we’re something different.” 

“Cherish is coming with us,” says Toast. “Some of the old War Boys and the Wretched too. People who they won’t have dealt with before.”

Furiosa doesn’t say anything but she imagines her finger on the trigger, the scope drifting down, blowing wide space through the burning man or the razorblade girl. It almost makes sense, putting her up a tower with a rifle in her hand; they’d all seen her blow out the Bullet Farmer’s light. She feels a little easier about it then; her shoulders drop and the air around her seems less stifling. This will be the broken population of the Citadel, standing up for the small things they have built, and she doesn’t mind being the one to watch it happen. She has always held herself separate from them anyway. Cherish will be with them, not in her tunnel, not preparing for the wasteland. 

“Who’s idea was this?” 

“Cheedo’s mostly,” says Capable, smiling. “She thinks we might salvage a relationship. It was her idea to bring the Wretched too, she’s done the most to help them.”

This is true, though it had taken awhile for Furiosa to notice. Cheedo riding up and down the lifts every day, hauling sacks of potatoes, rolls of bandage, huge empty drums to fill with water. She gives her mornings to Spoke in the infirmary and her evenings to her sisters and Furiosa, but the rest of her goes to the Wretched. 

“Dag wants you to take Angharad with you,” Capable continues. “So she knows she’s safe.” 

“No,” says Furiosa, glad to have something she is sure about. “She would be safer in the tunnel. She would be safer with Dag.”

“Cheedo thinks so too, but Dag refuses to be left behind.”

“It can’t be me who takes her.” 

Capable nods, accepting it without comment. Furiosa wonders at how hard it is to say the name Angharad sometimes. Angharad who is part of the fury road now, a fierce dead girl and a child. Then she considers what they’re asking her and what she will do if she survives. She is part of the fury road too, she thinks, a part of the horizon. She has never felt more settled than she does on a bike, in a car, even behind the wheel of the rig, always moving.

“I’ll be lookout,” she says. “Angharad will stay in the tunnel.” 

Capable leaves and Toast goes back to welding and Furiosa finds she cannot do it anymore. She pulls the glove back on, tugs at the fingertips, pinches at the thick fabric. There is something too close about folding metal over metal, sealing it with a scar, bubbling silver flesh. She has lost an arm to a machine and now she feels a little bit like a machine herself but welding isn’t healing. She takes off her glove. She thinks, suddenly, that there is some way she might heal someone, that Max’s leg had been in a brace and now it wasn’t. She has made and remade her left arm five times since she lost it. She brushes dust from her trousers and stands. She touches Toast’s shoulder as she passes her and Toast grunts her goodbye. 

Furiosa walks through the workshop and collects the pieces she might need like leather and screws and thin, flat pieces of metal. Pliers and heat. She bundles everything in a length of cloth and carries it under her arm and goes to find Max. He is in one of the gun rooms, quiet in a corner, clearing bullets so they’re less likely to backfire. 

“Come with me,” she says and he does. They go to the vault where the sun is strong through the checkered windows. She has a bench there with bits and pieces that didn’t make it to her arm. More delicate tools than can be found in Toast’s workshop. 

“What do you have?” Max asks her, nodding at the bundle. 

“I want to make you something,” she says. 

At first he lets her work around him. He sits on the bench and she touches his leg, points above his knee and below, taking vague measurements with the span of her fingers. But it is not enough, she is playing at being accurate because she’s scared of what might happen if she presses any closer. No, not scared, just apprehensive. He is wreathed in sun and she can’t be sure she’s not already asking to much.

“It should be under your clothing,” she tells him, picking up a piece of leather then putting it down again. “If you want it to be comfortable.” 

“You trying to get my pants off?” he asks, leaning back on his hands, and she smiles and her apprehension fades.

“Only if you want me to,” she says.

He does it and she’s so surprised she laughs and he looks at her sidelong and he’s almost smiling too. He kicks his ragged trousers off and he’s got something on underneath, the faded remains of of leggings, scraps of fabric held together by prayers. A better foundation for a brace in any case. 

It’s easier for her to work then, with his bare feet swinging, rubbing a knuckle at the sleep in the corners of his eyes. The knees of the leggings are badly patched and mostly gone and there is the a knot of scar tissue just above the joint. It seems almost alive, this scar, it’s so angry still. He digs his fingers into the muscle above the scar, shutting his eyes around the pain that must be there. When he’s done with that Furiosa touches him, bending and unbending his knee, folding lengths of leather above and below, feeling for the places that need support, cutting notches and making marks and writing numbers in charcoal on across the wooden bench. It’s perfunctory, she tells herself, even though she’d smiled and he’d smiled. She’s just helping him. She will take nothing from his skin he doesn’t give. 

“When did this happen?” she asks, when her measurements are made and he’s pulling his pants back on. 

“Maybe forty years ago,” he says.

“You were a child?”

“No.”

“You’re a spirit then,” she smiles. His scar is much younger than that though she doesn’t think he’s lying. “You’re a ghost.”

“Something like that.” 

There are stranger things in their world than a man stuck in his years and Furiosa doesn’t push it. He had been hung and hadn’t died. He had been blown to pieces in a storm and was still breathing. 

There is still most of the day left, their last day, so Furiosa works on the brace. There is movement on the ground, the citadel closing itself in, pulling up it’s hood, closing ranks. Cheedo will be with the Wretched, telling them of tunnels and a free life on the road, not painting it out to be easy, just telling them what it is. They know worse than she does, of course, but they will listen to her all the same. Capable will be with Cherish, talking the children down from their fear. Furiosa keeps her back to the windows so she doesn’t see the sun moving and the sky getting dark. Toast will be with her friends and their cars. Furiosa likes that she has friends. Max paces the edges of the rooms and comes to her when she calls for him and lets her test the pieces she makes against his leg, giving her his hands when one flesh and one metal aren’t enough. She’d made every one of her arms over several days, with War Boys at her beck and call, eager to help her. She wants Max’s to be done before the sun is gone completely. Dag will be with Angharad in the herb garden. 

When she's finished Max kisses her, standing in water. She has taken off her boots and her arm and rolled her sleeves up to her shoulders and she’s standing in the water, kicking her feet clean. He joins her, feet still bare, trousers rolled at the ankles. She has washed blood from his skin in this room and he has held her throat with his hands. He touches her arm first, the inside of her elbow with two fingers and then with three. Then he holds her by the arm, four fingers and the thumb against her pulse, and he kisses her. His lips are dry, hesitant, soft. She shuts her eyes and kisses him back, shuffles closer through the water so that his hand slides up her arm to her shoulder, her jaw, the soft hair at the nape of her neck. It feels like letting out a breath, like sighing, like sliding into her own body more comfortably than she ever thought she was able to. She opens his mouth with her tongue, presses her palm to his back, under his shirt, across the scarred tattoos Organic forced on him. When he pulls away she lets him, though she keeps her hand where it is so he might feel like he can stay.

“Tomorrow,” she says, because it’s so close and they’re so close and perhaps this is the first and the last of them.

“Capable has asked me to stand at the gate,” he says. He touches her face, the rise of her cheekbone, the soft skin under her eyes. She waits for him to tell her that he refused, because the citadel isn’t his, because he’s not made for front lines, because he’s made for _her_. “I’ve said yes,” he says and she shuts his eyes and they stand in water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took a thousand years again and i'm sorry. again. i think there will be three more chapters. i like thinking about max and his weird.. forever-boy-ness.. max in the wasteland for a thousand years, not dying, not alive. oh idk. thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! This is about as close to fluff I feel like I can get for these kids, considering their world and all, but there you go. Also this is breaking my streak of [thing] and [thing] titles which is...something. i am bad at titles. but my next mad max fic will be called 'moments of death' i know that much.


End file.
